You Know Me Well by Nina LaCour and David Levithan

read by Matthew Brown and Emma Galvin

You Know Me Well is a madcap buddy/coming-of-age/caper story for teens, set in San Francisco and an unnamed East Bay suburb (I’m thinking San Ramon?) during Pride Week. Co-written by David Levithan and Nina LaCour, it’s told in alternating points of view of the two main characters, who have sat next to each other in class for close to a year but never spoken. They meet unexpectedly on a painfully eventful night in San Francisco and instantly become each other’s manic pixie dream wingperson.

Mark is a boy who has been in love with his best friend, Ryan, for years (think Michael Novotny and Brian Kinney). They’ve fooled around, but for Ryan, that’s all he wants and all it ever was ever meant to be. Kate, meanwhile, has been long-distance in love with her best friend’s cousin, Violet—or at least the idea of Violet, since they’ve never actually met.

On the eventful night in question, Kate is actually going to get to meet Violet in person for the first time, and Mark and Ryan are encouraging each other to be brave at a party at a gay bar they’ve used fake IDs to get into. It’s set to be a magical evening… but falls completely apart. When Kate runs into Mark, they both need a friend very badly, and Kate decides, in a very straightforward way, to ask for that.

It ends up being both of their salvation, and their friendship is at the core of the book, though there’s romance and coming-of-age stuff going on, too. David Levithan’s unrealistically happy coincidences abound, but you can’t mind them; you want the characters, who have more than enough on their plates, to be helped along by fate and by wealthy Instagram fairy godfathers as much as possible.

The scenes in LGBTQ+ settings really shine—the jockey shorts dance contest and the LGBTQ+ poetry slam (for which a few actual not-bad and quite plausible poems were written) in particular. Less shiny is the character of Kate’s mean-girl best friend, whose actions and motivations are contradictory. Kate’s reasons for remaining friends with her are opaque to murky though most of the book, but they do become clearer toward the end. It’s a forgivable rough patch in a thoroughly enjoyable book.

Verdict: read it. It won’t change your life, but you’ll be glad you got to meet these kids and spend some time rooting for them.

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

read by Bahni Turpin

Children of Blood and Bone takes place a richly-detailed mythical African country called Orïsha, in which magic is very real. That is, it’s real until a ruthless, despotic king decides that magic and the dominant social order can't coexist. So he finds a way to sever the people’s connection to the gods; after that, it’s effectively dead. He then proceeds to persecute and oppress the former magic-using caste, calling them “worms” but treating them worse than any animal.

Our protagonist, Zélie, has the distinctive white hair of a (potential) magic user, and still has flashbacks to the night her mother was hauled off and killed by the king’s soldiers. As a “worm,” Zélie lives in grinding poverty and constant fear of the random cruelty of the king’s brutal guards. Not only is she not safe, but nobody associated with her has any real expectation of safety or fair treatment. 

Very much against her own better judgment, Zélie finds herself helping a young woman escape from the king’s guard… and that young woman turns out to be a royal princess, and in possession of an item that just might let Zélie bring magic back. If she can learn how to use it, and whom to trust, and if she can stay ahead of the king’s guard and get to a mythical island on the one day of the year that it appears.

What’s wonderful about this book is the way it takes what could be a fairly standard fantasy plot line and enriches it, transforms it, and fills it with surprises. Not simply by setting it in a mythical Africa instead of a mythical Europe, though Adeyemi does a wonderful job of that (Nnedi Okorafor calls it Africanjujuism); but also by taking individual elements of the plot (the romantic interest, the rules by which magic works, the hero’s journey) and subverting them.

In short, this is a very solid and compelling read, especially for anyone who loves fantasy or who used to love fantasy but has become bored with how derivative the genre has become. 

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

Gender Queer is a graphic memoir about coming of age as genderqueer and asexual. If you don’t know what any of this means, great! When you’re done reading this book, you will. But we can start here:

A graphic memoir is a memoir that looks like a novel-length comic book—it’s written and illustrated in panels, with word bubbles and so on. But it’s not a made-up story, and there are no superheroes or anthropomorphic animals. It’s somebody’s life story; specifically, the story of Maia Kobabe’s growing-up years.

The author identifies as genderqueer. That’s a pretty general label for people who don’t identify as either male or female—deep inside, they don’t feel like either, or maybe they feel like a little of both, or maybe which gender they feel like changes from day to day, or maybe the whole idea of gender, as either a binary or a spectrum, feels alien and wrong to their experience of the world and themselves--so the labels “male” and “female” both feel deeply wrong to them.

The author is also asexual, which is a sexual orientation (like straight, or gay, or bisexual, or any other label that identifies who you’re sexually attracted to). Asexuals (sometimes called aces for short) have no sexual desire for anybody, though some aces do enjoy romantic relationships.

So, those are the basics, extremely simplified. What this book does, skillfully, is help you *understand* all that, by showing it to you through the lens of one person’s experience.

You won’t just get exposed to the terminology (though that’s not a small part of this book); you’ll get a sense of what it feels like to grow up as a singularly-shaped peg that everyone insists should fit into either a round or a square hole. The author’s skill with words and pictures makes what could be a dry primer on gender into a story you will probably find yourself relating to—If you’ve ever been a teenager who feels at all different from their parents and/or peers, that is.

Definitely worth a read.

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

read by Michael Crouch

Oh my goodness, what a sweet story. I don’t mean sappy—I mean the protagonist has a fantastic personality (airily witty, a little insecure, loving, impulsive, just precocious enough to be adorable and just bad enough at stuff to be believable) and ends up in a ridiculously bad situation and muddles through it as best he can and ends up… well, I won’t spoil it for you.

The setup: Simon Spier is a closeted gay teenager who has somehow managed to make contact, anonymously, with another closeted gay boy at his high school. They deliberately don’t know who the other is; they call each other by code names (the other boy calls himself “Blue”) and they communicate without details that would out them to each other. Within that anonymity, they develop a super close bond that is just starting to feel romantic as the story begins.

And then, disaster strikes. Simon forgets to close out his email account on a school computer, and another kid, who has a crush on one of Simon’s female friends, finds it, takes some screen shots, and uses the information to blackmail Simon into playing wingman for him. It’s not entirely that Simon doesn’t want to be out as gay—he does, he’s just waiting for the right time. But he feels sure that if Blue gets outed, he’ll never speak to Simon again. And that’s just unacceptable.

Hijinks ensue, and this book is plot-based enough that I don’t dare say another word about them. So there you go.

What I loved about this book: well, Simon’s personality, which I already discussed. And the fact that any character you spend any time with at all is also a distinct personality, and all the interwoven and complex relationships including a few intense friendships (the kind most people don't have past high school), and the moral ambiguity and complexity of the situations and people’s reactions to them. Also the many cultural references—I’m the wrong age to get many of them, but I enjoyed the way they were tossed around in a way that made the characters and setting more grounded in reality and I ended up googling some music.

Oh, and I understand this has been made into a movie called Love, Simon. It's probably pretty good. But I've already got these characters in my head just the way I want them to be, in part because Michael Crouch did such a fantastic job with the reading for the audiobook. So I'm going to hold off on watching it, for now at least. I'm sure my curiosity will get the better of me eventually.

Basically this book is better than it needs to be, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommend.

Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

read by Michael Levi Harris

So what we have here is a kid who calls himself a “fractional Persian”—raised “American” in the U.S. by his Persian mom and blond “Übermensch” dad. (He loves Persian cooking, for example, but only speaks enough Farsi to be polite and talk about food.) He nerds out about Star Trek, Tolkien, Harry Potter, and, of all things, tea. He’s a little overweight and get teased at school and doesn’t have many friends, which makes him a constant disappointment to his dad. In fact, Star Trek is just about all he has in common with his dad. That, and depression, and a chronic inability to express himself.

He’s also smart and thoughtful and, it turns out, pretty decent at soccer, a.k.a. non-American football—and a really good friend. But we don’t know about any of this at the beginning of the story, and neiher does he. Well, maybe the smart part, but not the rest.

Things start to move when the family takes a trip to Yazd, Iran, to visit with the grandparents he’s never met in person before. His grandfather is formidable and his grandmother is sweet and he’s expected to make friends with the neighbor kid, Sohrab. Which actually turns out to be the greatest thing ever. Because Sohrab is super interested in Darius, and draws him out, and helps him feel like it’s okay to be himself, fractional or not.

What I loved about this book: it made me fall in love with Iran and with Persian culture (and made me super hungry for Persian food). The relationships were varied, three-dimensional, believable, relatable, and central to the story. The drama was dramatic indeed… but also understated (way more Benjamin Alire Sáenz than, say, Francesca Lia Block). There was tons of representation, most of it very off-hand, all of it spot-on, especially regarding depression. And Darius himself was such a sweet, dysfunctional nerd. I feel like I went out with him, or maybe I was him, in high school.

Highly recommend for all fractional Americans and most anybody else.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, Book 2) by Seanan McGuire

Note: though this book *could* stand alone, it’s not really meant to; it’s a prequel to Every Heart a Doorway, which is fantastic and should be read first. It’s the story of a very special school: Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. It’s for children who, like Alice Liddell and Coraline Jones and the Pevensies kids and so on, went through some kind of magical doorway to an improbable realm whose rules (of manners, logic, and even physics) were not our own—and then returned to the real world.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones is the backstory of two of those students, Jack and Jill (or as their extremely rigid parents insist that they be called at all times, Jacqueline and Jillian) Wolcott. They’re twins, born to an emotionally-stunted couple with extremely firm and inflexible views about how children in general and each of their daughters specifically should behave.

Roles are assigned—Jacqueline is the “girly” one, always dressed in frilly dresses and terrorized into keeping them perfectly clean (and into a shyness and timidity that isn’t really natural to her). Jillian, who seems the more physically active of the two, is designated the "tomboy," encouraged to go outside and get muddy and given appropriate clothes for that, whether she likes it or not. Each resents her own role and her twin’s occupation of the role she thinks she’d prefer, and over the years they grow to dislike one another.

They do have a loving grandmother who cares for them and encourages them to love each other and to be exactly who they are, rather than who their parents want them to be. But she’s banished from their lives on their 5th birthday, never to be seen again. The girls are encouraged to think their beloved grandmother didn't love them enough to stay, and they grow up living with that terrible "knowledge."

Once the story gets properly going, the girls find a magic staircase in what should have been an old trunk full of dress-up clothes. Of course they go down it—hundreds, or maybe thousands, of steps down into the earth. At the bottom they find a door labeled “Be sure.” One twin is definitely more sure than the other—but nevertheless they open it and step through, and find themselves on a dark, rolling moor. They pick a direction and start walking--and anything more than that would be a spoiler.

Let’s just say the world they find themselves in is deeply creepy.

I loved lots of things about this book. The world building is definitely its strength, the language is drily quirky, and you can’t help but empathize with these poor kids. However, it’s too slender a book. And it gets that way by skimping on what would, to me, have been the most interesting part: the process by which each girl learns and grows into her new role in their new reality.

If it had been up to me, the book would have been twice as long and included a chapter apiece, for each twin, on each of the five years spent in The Moors that are covered in this book. The twins are such interesting characters, and the Moors are such a fascinating place, that it’s a real disappointment not being able to spend sufficient time with either.

Lacking that, though, it’s still a beautifully-written little story, with numerous archly humorous lines that had me laughing out loud. If you’re a fan of Every Heart a Doorway, you’ll definitely want to read this.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz

read by Lin-Manuel Miranda

It’s 1987 and 15-year-old Aristotle Mendoza has a whole summer ahead of him, with all the freedom and potential for adventure and boredom that that implies. He needs to get away from the house one fateful, stifling day, so he heads for the public swimming pool. He doesn’t know how to swim, but he can still splash around and cool off. As it turns out, there’s another bored 15-year-old there—his name is Dante, and he offers to teach Ari to swim. Ari’s not sure why he takes Dante up on this odd offer, but he does.

Aside from bonding over their similarly odd names, the two couldn’t be more different. Ari is a working-class kid, the youngest of four, though his oldest brother went to prison when Ari was only 4 years old and both of his sisters grew up and left the house years ago. His Vietnam-veteran dad is withdrawn and uncommunicative, and his mom pushes him to succeed. In response to all this, Ari has developed an uncaring, tough-guy exterior and is completely out of touch with his own tremendous store of pent-up anger and sadness.

Dante, on the other hand, wears his enthusiasms and admittedly odd thoughts and points of view on his sleeve. The only child of affectionate, well-to-do parents, he’s somewhere between happy-go-lucky and neurotic. He’s also as close to openly gay as a teenager can be in El Paso, Texas in 1987.

The two accept and even enjoy each other’s differences, and they make each other laugh. Soon they develop a friendship that can survive anything… even Ari saving Dante’s life. But sooner or later Ari is going to have to figure out who he is and who he wants to be, and what that means for him and Dante.

If you can possibly get your hands on a copy of the audiobook version of this, do (pro tip: you can probably download it from your library for free). Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lively and nuanced reading makes an already-fantastic story spring to life.

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

read by Dan Bittner

Sort of a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood, set in Mexico City, with mismatched teen protagonists (one mortal and one vampire) thrown together in an improbable buddy story where the buddies’ lives are in constant peril, this book should have been tremendous fun. And it really was pretty good… but that was it.

I think the main problem was that I listened to the audiobook instead of reading the print version. Dan Bittner has a fine reading voice and all that, but he doesn’t know how to pronounce Spanish. Which, since the characters are all meant to be Spanish-speakers living in a Spanish-speaking country, is very distracting. There is no need for the narrator to fall into the trope of speaking English with a Spanish accent as a way of letting the listener know that the characters are actually meant to be speaking Spanish, but he ought to at least be able to pronounce proper nouns properly.

Aside from that… the protagonist is clearly meant to be sympathetic, and he is, more or less. But he’s a callow youth, scrappy and perfectly gallant, but not very interesting. The fledgling vampire he’s thrown together with is a much more interesting character, but we don’t get much time with her point of view. Oh, and there’s a lady cop who is stuck doing shady stuff because she’s a single mom and needs the money. A stock character and definitely uninteresting.

What’s interesting about this book is the world it’s set in. There are numerous species of vampire, which all have different appearances, abilities, and vulnerabilities—which explains why, although vampire legends exist throughout the world, they vary tremendously in their details. Each government has responded differently to the existence of these beings, which makes sense too. This is, potentially, a very rich setting for further stories, as this writer’s skill develops.

I’m treating this as the book version of the first X-Men movie—not that great on its own, but setting the stage for future good stuff. And who knows, maybe someone will take this raw material and make a great TV series or movie based on it.

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley

narrated by Charlotte Parry

Ah yes, Beauty and the Beast: the classic fairy tale about Stockholm Syndrome. I have to admit that I am enough of a fan of this story (and of modern retellings of fairy tales generally) to have sought out the live action version last year. And to have thoroughly enjoyed it—because, duh, Emma Watson, but also, Josh Gad as LeFou: what a performance! Totally stole the show.

But also, like any right-thinking person, I’m always a bit queasy about the premise, no matter how good the execution is. Basically this is the story of a young woman trapped in an enchanted castle by a man who has literally become a monster due to a (well-deserved) curse, and whose only hope of becoming human again is to have someone agree, of their own free will, to marry him.

But apparently in this universe the idea of “free will” isn’t negated by coercing someone to live with him by threatening grave harm to said person’s father, who innocently stumbled across an enchanted castle and plucked a single rose to bring her as a souvenir—so that’s exactly what the Beast does. It’s not technically kidnapping, but morally speaking, it might as well be.

Of course if we take all of this stuff literally, and not as a metaphor for bad things that happen in real life, we can decide to just focus, as this retelling does, on Beauty’s specific experience, her bravery and loyalty and ability to see the good in just about any person or situation. And on the magic and the tragedy of the castle and its various inhabitants.

If your only experience of this tale is the two Disney adaptations, you’ll notice some changes in this version. For one thing, “Beauty” is just a nickname—one that its bearer has come to dislike, over the years, even more than she originally disliked her given name, Honor. That’s because she’s not as beautiful as her two sisters.

The book spends quite a bit of time telling the story of the three sisters and their father and their various suitors, and how they became impoverished, and how they settled in their new life. A lot of time. About two-thirds of the book. Fortunately for Beauty, there is no Gaston in this retelling (which, alas, means no LeFou). Her troubles are a quieter sort—until her father falls afoul of the Beast, who threatens to kill him for taking one of his many flowers as a gift for Beauty. But Beauty offers herself in her father’s place, and somehow convinces her father to accept this, under a lot of protest.

At the enchanted castle at last, Beauty encounters the invisible servants of the original tale (not the talking animated objects of the Disney versions) and sets about making the best of her new circumstances. The best part is, of course, the library—this Beauty being just as bookish as Disney’s Belle—but I won’t spoil it for you, there being few enough surprises in this version. The rest of the story goes on more or less as one would expect, if somewhat condensed.

The end of the tale is extremely condensed—that, apparently, not being the part McKinley was most interested in. That was a bit disappointing. But overall, this is beautifully written, and, in spite of a certain vagueness about when it’s supposed to have taken place, it does a lovely job of bringing these characters and this story to life. Recommended for adult and teen fans of the genre or of fantasy in general.

Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis: #tbt review

A catastrophic water shortage has divided the world into two groups: those who have reliable access to safe drinking water, and those who would do anything to get it. 

Lynn’s life is simple: she and her mom trust nobody, depend on nobody but each other, and spend their nights in their basement and their days doing whatever it takes to feed themselves and to protect their pond. Then strangers appear, Lynn’s world turns upside down, and she has to reevaluate everything she’s ever been taught.

This book starts out grim and gets grimmer; it’s not going to make a convert of anybody who isn’t already a fan of intensely dark dystopian fiction. The protagonist is a remorseless killer and the threat (and sometimes the reality) of rape, slavery, and lesser forms of violence are never entirely absent. But for readers who like this sort of thing and can hang on through several chapters during which there seems to be little point in caring about characters whose lives are so precarious, there is a big payoff. 

Lynn’s claustrophobic world grows whether she likes it or not, and she’s got to find a way to grow with it or die. Fortunately, there’s a core of resilience and a desire for connection buried deep within the many layers of rigid self-sufficiency and misanthropy that her mother has armored her with, and she’s able to grope her way toward an extremely hard-won redemption. 

It’s an ambiguous redemption at best, though, tainted by irreparable losses: the implacable and deeply disturbing forces at play in this horrific and all-too-plausible future aren’t going anywhere. Thoughtfully and realistically written; well above average for books of this genre; but definitely not for the faint of heart or for younger teens. Highly recommended for readers who loved The Hunger Games or Divergent.

The Dark Between by Sonia Gensler: #tbt review

Plucky, street-wise Kate is an orphan who has just lost her last hope of making an even vaguely respectable living. Frail, dreamy Elsie suffers from fits and can’t admit to anybody what she sees while she has them. Handsome, brooding Asher is just trying to get away from an American father he hates. 

The members of this ragtag group of Victorian teens find their various ways to London’s Summerfield College, where all is not as it seems. There have been mysterious deaths, and the three very different young people are going to have to start trusting each other before they can learn the disturbing truth--and how to deal with their own dark secrets.

This is an entertaining paranormal mystery in the gothic vein with fairly judicious touches of steampunk. It does suffer from a very common fault, that of putting characters with distinctly modern attitudes into a setting that is supposed to be more or less historical. Also, the vast majority of the story's tension revolves around the fact that these characters repeatedly fail to just come out and tell each other what they obviously need to know. 

Nonetheless, the story carries the reader along an amusing roller-coaster of a plot with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. Refreshingly, the obvious pair-off fails to materialize, and the way the lines between the spirit world and the world of hard-nosed scientific discovery are blurred is interesting in itself. A fun, light read for younger and middle teens.

Protector of the Small: First Test by Tamora Pierce: #tbt review

This is another book that my kid fell in love with when I would have thought they were too young for it, because I was listening to it in the car. With hindsight, I can see that they loved the heroine's strong sense of justice and her refusal to fit into prescribed gender roles.

Plus Tamora Pierce has done a great job of world-building here. If you're a fan of fantasy but you haven't read any of her books yet, you should—and this one would be a great place to start. It comes after the Song of the Lioness series and makes numerous references to storylines and characters from it, but someone who hasn't read that first (as I hadn't!) won't be at all lost.

As this novel begins, because of the pioneering work of the great Lady Knight, Alanna the Lioness, girls have won the right to go into service as pages and become knights. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Keladry of Mindelan is the first one to attempt it, and she learns very quickly just how stacked against her the deck is.

Not only is the system itself unfair, but on top of that, she immediately ends up on probation because of the actions of a bully. She has to work so much harder and overcome so many more obstacles than any boy… it would be so easy to give up. 

But she’s always wanted this, and it seems at least one person in the world believes she can really do it: a mysterious benefactor keeps sending her expensive gifts that are exactly what a page needs. Plus, Kel has never been able to abide a bully. Something has to be done about this one, or he’ll be able to get away with hurting her friends, too.

This is basically the story of the first girl going to a West Point-type military academy, only in a fantasy setting. Keladry lives out the maxim that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to be considered half as good. It’s a good introduction for middle-grade kids and younger teens to this sort of story, and Kel is a compelling character—she makes mistakes and has bad days but her determination and her unwavering protectiveness of those who are taken advantage of by others who are stronger keep her going.

The author, Tamora Pierce, originally studied psychology with an eye toward doing social work with teenagers. But she became a full-time writer instead in 1992, and I'm glad—I'm sure she has reached a lot more teens with her writing than she could have as a social worker.

The Free Lunch by Spider Robinson: #tbt review

If the Master, Robert A. Heinlein, had been born a Boomer instead of a member of the Greatest Generation, he would have been Spider Robinson. If you have any fondness for Heinlein or for the Happiest Place on Earth or for ripping yarns where a young hero has to save the world, this book is for you.

Our protagonist, brilliant twelve-year-old Mike, has such a terrible secret that he needs to find a way to fall completely off the face of the Earth. He accomplishes this by disappearing into the “off-stage” areas of the world’s most perfect theme park, Dreamland. Nobody will find him there—except someone does. It turns out a woman named Annie pulled the exact same disappearing act thirteen years ago, and she’s still there. 

The two of them team up, watching each other’s backs and becoming friends. Then they discover that not only are they not as safe as they’d hoped, but the fate of the world is in their hands.

“Dreamland” is a futuristic Disneyland: a totally immersive theme park where the illusion is complete and the off-stage areas are extremely well-concealed. The book is worth reading for the descriptions of the magical theme park and its mysterious underpinnings alone; the close bond that Mike develops with Annie and the ripping yarn that ensues when they realize they have to save the world make it a must-read.

Have Spacesuit—Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein: #tbt review

Kip’s dream of going to the moon turns into a nightmare when evil aliens kidnap him and a little girl and take them there. How will he escape—and moreover, how will he justify humanity’s existence when it’s put on trial?

One of the golden-age Master of Science Fiction’s many “juveniles,” Have Space Suit—Will Travel has stood the test of time better than most. Kip is a high school senior who dreams of traveling to the Moon. He makes it there, but by a surprising route: he’s kidnapped, along with a little girl named Peewee and an alien he calls the Mother Thing, by a malignantly aggressive species Kip calls Wormfaces. Eventually the three work together and escape, but that’s not the end of the story: now the fate of all humanity is on Kip and Peewee’s shoulders as their species is put on trial before an interplanetary court.

As with the protagonists in Heinlein's other juveniles, the teens in this story will seem oddly young in some ways to modern readers, and their characters too good to be true. This is partly a function of the era in which the book was written—things really were different then—and of what was considered appropriate material for young adults to read at the time. But that also makes this book a fascinating glimpse into the culture of the 1950s.

A ripping yarn. Read!

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Narrated by Robin Miles

You know that old saw, you can never go home again? That’s definitely going to be true for our protagonist, Binti, when or if she ever does go back to Earth. She’s the first member of her community to go to university, and it’s going to change her in ways that even other folks who have also traveled off-planet for school couldn’t have predicted. Her trip to Oomza University is also going have a bigger effect on interspecies relations than anybody could have imagined.

This compact little Hugo- and Nebula-winning novella—an easy one-afternoon read—packs a lot into not very many pages. The central idea is that diverse peoples and individuals all have their own unique gifts to bring to the world (or worlds!), and that there can be terrible danger in ignoring that, and in behaving in a colonialist fashion. Binti is super smart and brave, going out to study at university in spite of her family’s (and her technologically savvy but highly insular community’s) displeasure at her departure and perceived disloyalty.

Binti is nothing if not loyal, though--to her father and the skills he taught her, to her community’s traditions, to the new friends she makes, to the university that has accepted her, and even to the agreement she makes with the warlike aliens that attack her transport. And being Binti, a highly skilled harmonizer, she finds a way to make potentially divided loyalties not divide her at all, but instead… well, I’ll stop right there or I might give away too much.

This is a good read. If you’re not used to novellas, the pacing is a little odd--far too much backstory and setup for a short story, but the resolution is much too fast for a novel. It reminded me of the pacing of a children’s book, though the content is definitely not for children. Then again, if you’re not used to novellas, maybe it’s time you tried one! This would be a fine place to start. Also a fine place to start with afrofuturism, if you’re not familiar with it.

(What? You haven’t seen Black Panther? Go out and watch that, too!  Speaking of which, if you liked Black Panther and you like this book, you’ll be pleased to know that Ms. Okorafor co-wrote a recent installment of the Black Panther comic series with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Which makes a lot of sense: Binti reminds me of a younger, less-self-assured Shuri.)

And speaking of trying things, do listen to the audiobook version if possible; Robin Miles does an incredible job narrating.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer: #tbt review

The human era has ended. An alien species who call themselves the Souls have taken over the Earth and no humans who are still human remain, aside from a few ragged, very hunted bands. Wanderer, a member of this alien species, survives parasitically by taking over other the bodies of individuals of other species—destroying their minds in the process.

But there’s something wrong with Wanderer’s host, Mel. Her feelings are too strong and her mind refuses to go away. Now Wanderer isn’t just a Soul anymore: she's an abomination to her own species, a combination of minds in one body. 

The other Souls mustn’t know that Mel’s mind still exists; they'd destroy Mel's body and Wanderer with it. At the same time, Wanderer's very existence is inimical to all humanity—so there's no hope to be found there. She must find a way to work with Mel if she is to survive on a planet where she doesn’t belong anywhere and everybody wants her dead.

This is a fascinating piece of speculative fiction that gets into the mind and the motivations of a member of a species that any rational human would consider intrinsically evil. This species exists by invading the bodies and destroying the minds of other species—and doesn’t consider itself evil, any more than any predator does. The speculation extends to the nature of memory (how much of it exists in the physical brain? Do we have souls?), the mind/body dichotomy, and the power of love and forgiveness.

Don't let this author's other books scare you away from this one; there are no vampires, sparkly or otherwise, to be found. This is good, meaty sci fi. Highly recommend.

Teen Angst? Naaah...: A Quasi-Autobiography: #tbt review

Smart-alec urban nerd Ned Vizzini (author of It's Kind of a Funny Story) wrote a lot of anecdotes about junior high and high school and got them published while he was under 18. This collection of marvelously self-deprecating pieces will feel familiar to anybody who has ever been a teenager.

Vizzini was a nerdy Magic-playing teenager in New York City in the 1990s, and wrote about it. A lot of those anecdotes got published, and they’re all here, from the day he first played Nintendo in middle school to getting into the best public school in NYC to coming home drunk for the very first time to falling in love. The sum total of his anecdotes is a thoughtful and eloquent memoir of an adolescence, told from the point of view of someone who was still there at the time.

These are engaging little vignettes that show the author’s progress from late childhood to late adolescence, somewhere between awkwardness and grace. This is a young man who is privileged to be white and smart and financially secure in a city where many teens are anything but; he’s well aware of this. At the same time, he has faced social and emotional handicaps that form the basis of his self-deprecating sense of humor. This is a very real account of life in the big city for a teenager who may not be exactly typical but who faces many of the same problems that other teens face.

It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living by Dan Savage and Terry Miller: #tbt reviews

In response to a series of teen suicides in 2010, famed sex and relationship advice columnist Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, put together this collection of open letters to LGBTQ+ teens to let them know that life really does get better after high school and to inspire them and give them courage to stick around, even in the face of bullying, and discover that for themselves.

After years of bullying, 15-year-old Justin Aalberg hanged himself in his bedroom in the summer of 2010. His suicide was followed by that of Billy Lucas, and others followed them. Dan Savage, a longtime advocate for queer rights, was painfully aware of these deaths and wished he could speak directly to young people being bullied everywhere, to let them know that it gets better if they can just manage to stick around long enough. 

Then it occurred to him that in the age of the Internet, he could speak directly to teens. He and his husband, Terry Miller, put together a video talking about that and posted it on YouTube, hoping to inspire perhaps 100 other queer adults to do the same. 

Their video went way beyond viral.

As of December 2011, over 10,000 people had made videos for the project: teens and adults in towns and cities across the world; celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres; and even President Obama. The book is a compilation of hundreds of these open letters: some transcriptions of the videos, some essays that have grown out of the videos, and some original material. The book also includes resources for queer youth and their parents, educators, and anybody who cares about them.

These are amazing stories, as individual as the people who wrote them. Each one is a celebration of life and a heartfelt plea to kids who are being bullied today to stick around long enough to learn for themselves that it does, in fact, get better.

Exception: some of the pieces, such as the one by President Obama, though they may be sincere, come across as overly polished and somewhat self-serving. The letters written by actual members of the LGBTQ+ community ring much more true and will mean more to LGBTQ+ kids. Nonetheless, it’s important for kids who are being bullied for their sexuality to read the other letters too. Because if the President of the United States thinks what these kids are going through is important enough for him to be talking about, well… maybe it does get better.

[Note from the present: Um, yeah. Let's just put a pin in that one. -MN, July 2018]

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow: #tbt review

Marcus, a highly individualistic and very tech-savvy teen, lives in the interface between his “real” life of school and parents and real-world friends and his extensive virtual life. Then terrorists attack his city—and he, along with three of his friends, are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are detained and interrogated (read: tortured) by the DHS; one of his friends is "disappeared" and the other two are too afraid to act after they’re released.

Marcus is afraid, too; he's not stupid. Nevertheless he vows to bring down the DHS and, once he learns his friend is still alive, to rescue his friend, whatever it takes. Aided by the powers of friendship, Bayesian probability, and a community of like-minded hacker types, Marcus puts his freedom, his love, and his life on the line to restore civil liberties to his fellow San Franciscans and to bring his friend safely home to his family.

Every young person, and everybody who values their freedom in this society, should read this book. It’s about how technology can be used against us *and* against those who would use it against us; it’s about growing up immersed in this kind of technology; and it’s about not lying back and just accepting what we’re told about what’s really going on and what we can or can’t do about it. 

It’s also an extremely compelling story about a city, a group of friends, and one boy in particular who grows up very suddenly but manages to retain his youthful fire and idealism. And who pays a terrible price for that idealism… but buys, for that coin, something incredibly precious. 

Superman: Earth One, Volume One, by Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis: #tbt review

(Finished April 13, 2015)

Loved bringing Superman into the modern age. Plot holes (old and new) neatly filled; Clark has an appealing complexity and isn't always immune to temptation (though this isn't massively, oppressively grimdark like the most recent movies). But his life will show him the way—he seems to have faith in that, and as the reader, I'm happy to concur—and he will learn that there are no simple choices.

Oh, and the artwork. So gorgeous. A thousand times I have picked up a graphic novel based on the gorgeousness of the cover art and been disappointed by clunky, unimaginative, and even amateurish drawing throughout the body of the story. Not so here. Of course the cover is still the most fully-realized image in the book, but thought and care and skill have been applied throughout.

Not a DC person? Maybe this series will change your mind. Don't know what that means? This is a great entry-point into that universe. Four stars, and high hopes that the whole series will amount to five.